Salinas – A man who says he is a “former jihad terrorist” spoke Sunday to a Salinas church about the threat of radical Islam.

Kamal Saleem, dogged by allegations he is a fraud, spoke to roughly 300 people at the First Presbyterian Church on South Main Street.

The Lebanese man’s story is that he was a former terrorist taught to hate Jews and Christians as a young Muslim. He said he spent years in America recruiting Islamists before converting to Christianity and changing his ways.

He claims to have worked for Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat but publications Mother Jones and others reported parts of his story are suspicious if not completely untrue.

“No major war of liberation in the Arab world seems to have gone off without his expertise,” wrote one critical review of his book “The Blood of Lambs” in Christianity Today.

Academics have also criticized Saleem for “fantastical” stories, such as infiltrating Israel as a child to plant bombs, according to the New York Times.

Pastor Mike Ladra said he believes Saleem. One of the reasons is that he wrote a book with former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William G. Boykin, making it unlikely someone that involved in national defense would be fooled.

Saleem told The Herald he was genuine.

“Why would you lie about something to put your family in jeopardy and run from place to place?” he said.

Saleem said the church paid for his flight and hotel. He sold books in the lobby.

Sitting on the stage with a large cross behind him, Saleem told the pastor, sitting to his right, about how Islam was different from Christianity.

“Islam is the only religion today that asks for a blood sacrifice before Allah. You cannot worship Allah without blood,” he said. “… You must offer yourself by killing yourself, or killing others.” Saleem said Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, did not teach salvation by grace like Jesus Christ and that the Allah of the Qur’an hated the world.

He repeated a complicated claim that Muhammad had married a 6-year-old girl named Aisha. Although the story appears in the Sahih Bukhari Islamic text, some Muslim scholars have questioned the account.

“He even whipped her,” Saleem said.

He said Sharia, or Islamic law, treats woman as having half a brain.

Saleem praised the U.S. Constitution because he said it was created by God using the Book of Isaiah, which appears in Christian and Jewish holy books.

He said one of his largest critics, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and were threatened by his message.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan branch of the council, has questioned probably the most scrutinized part of Saleem’s story.

“The FBI or the Department of Homeland Security don’t let people who are terrorists into the country and not detain them just because they claim they got the Holy Ghost,” he told Mother Jones.

Ladra and Saleem repeatedly said they were not preaching hate but looking at the “source documents” for Islam, such as the Qur’an.

The pastor said he would like to have Saleem back again but no date had been determined at press time.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said there was nothing wrong with the officials expressing “private political views via private text messages.” Strzok, in particular, “did not say anything about Donald Trump that the majority of Americans weren’t also thinking at the same time,” he said.

By William Booth | Washington Post LONDON – At $1 billion it is the most expensive embassy ever constructed. But its designers say the new American chancery on the Thames River marks a paradigm shift in design: the U.S. Embassy here will exude openness, while hiding all the clever ways it defends itself from attack. After decades of building American...